I am going to get a new Motherboard and I want it to have onboard raid. What I was wondering are there any pitfalls to raid drives and Linux and do you know of any good motherboards that have onboard raid and are supported well in Linux. The good news is that money is not one of my main problems, I am looking to spend up to £200 so that should be plenty. I thought I would post this before I get the board, hopefully I can get the right board that is supported by Linux thus stopping me having the problems after I have brought it. Any help or suggestions will be appreciated
Chris Drane
On Saturday, September 14, 2002, at 12:05 PM, Christopher Drane wrote:
I am going to get a new Motherboard and I want it to have onboard raid. What I was wondering are there any pitfalls to raid drives and Linux and do you know of any good motherboards that have onboard raid and are supported well in Linux. The good news is that money is not one of my main problems, I am looking to spend up to £200 so that should be plenty. I thought I would post this before I get the board, hopefully I can get the right board that is supported by Linux thus stopping me having the problems after I have brought it. Any help or suggestions will be appreciated
If you are using RAID, I don't suggest having it on the motherboard. The reason for this is failure. Unless you have another m/b of the same type, it will be difficult to recover your data.
Go for a PCI-card, or better yet, an external RAID unit which plugs into a standard interface. If the RAID fails, it will be much easier to recover your data on another machine.
Others on the list should be able to suggest the best solutions to use with Linux.
--
Ashley T. Howes Ph.D. http://www.ashleyhowes.com
"When all the animals of this world are gone, man will die of loneliness"
Ashley ashley@ashleyhowes.com writes:
If you are using RAID, I don't suggest having it on the motherboard. The reason for this is failure. Unless you have another m/b of the same type, it will be difficult to recover your data.
But you have backups anyway, right?
On 15-Sep-2002 Richard Kettlewell wrote:
Ashley ashley@ashleyhowes.com writes:
If you are using RAID, I don't suggest having it on the motherboard. The reason for this is failure. Unless you have another m/b of the same type, it will be difficult to recover your data.
But you have backups anyway, right?
OK ,let's ask the awkward questions. 1.How many of the members of this list have *complete* backups the their umpteen-gigabyte disks? 2. How long would it take you to rebuild your system to ts *current* state after a disk crash?
I have complete, daily tape backups, but I have never yet managed to rebuild a system in under a week. The new system always has a slightly different configuration from the old one, and there is always something that I overlook when selecting what to restore. Then there are incompatible libraries etc.
(There's no need to CC me on postings to the list.)
Raphael Mankin writes:
On 15-Sep-2002 Richard Kettlewell wrote:
But you have backups anyway, right?
OK ,let's ask the awkward questions. 1.How many of the members of this list have *complete* backups the their umpteen-gigabyte disks?
I have a couple of specific filesystems that are documented as not backed up. They only contain data mirrored from the internet, scratch files, unpacked-but-unmodified source trees, etc. Everything else in the house - four computers - is fully backed up, with any given system being backed up every other night (provided I remember to change the tape, which I usually do).
- How long would it take you to rebuild your system to ts *current*
state after a disk crash?
I had a motherboard go bad and mangle some of the filesystems (particularly /, and particularly /etc), and it took less than 24 hours to restore everything in that case. (If you count getting the motherboard replaced then several weeks, but I'm not convinced that's what you meant.)
I have complete, daily tape backups, but I have never yet managed to rebuild a system in under a week. The new system always has a slightly different configuration from the old one, and there is always something that I overlook when selecting what to restore. Then there are incompatible libraries etc.
Err. Just restore absolutely everything, surely?
ttfn/rjk
On 15-Sep-2002 Richard Kettlewell wrote:
I had a motherboard go bad and mangle some of the filesystems (particularly /, and particularly /etc), and it took less than 24 hours to restore everything in that case. (If you count getting the motherboard replaced then several weeks, but I'm not convinced that's what you meant.)
I have complete, daily tape backups, but I have never yet managed to rebuild a system in under a week. The new system always has a slightly different configuration from the old one, and there is always something that I overlook when selecting what to restore. Then there are incompatible libraries etc.
Err. Just restore absolutely everything, surely?
Yes, but after a couple of years of oepration I never want quite the same config as I had before. anyway, the new disk is always so much bigger than the old one.
(I'm curious as to which part of "There's no need to CC me on postings to the list." you don't understand. Please stop.)
Raphael Mankin writes:
Richard Kettlewell wrote:
Raphael Mankin writes:
I have complete, daily tape backups, but I have never yet managed to rebuild a system in under a week. The new system always has a slightly different configuration from the old one, and there is always something that I overlook when selecting what to restore. Then there are incompatible libraries etc.
Err. Just restore absolutely everything, surely?
Yes, but after a couple of years of oepration I never want quite the same config as I had before. anyway, the new disk is always so much bigger than the old one.
I think the ridiculously long time to restore the system is your own fault, in that case...
ttfn/rjk
Richard Kettlewell rjk@terraraq.org.uk wrote:
(I'm curious as to which part of "There's no need to CC me on postings to the list." you don't understand. Please stop.)
Are you setting Mail-Followup-To? If so, I'll investigate further, as it's not showing up here.
MJR
MJ Ray markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk writes:
Richard Kettlewell rjk@terraraq.org.uk wrote:
(I'm curious as to which part of "There's no need to CC me on postings to the list." you don't understand. Please stop.)
Are you setting Mail-Followup-To? If so, I'll investigate further, as it's not showing up here.
On the original posting (84d6rfzgw0.fsf@rjk.greenend.org.uk), yes.
On Sunday 15 Sep 2002 1:53 pm, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
(There's no need to CC me on postings to the list.)
Raphael Mankin writes:
On 15-Sep-2002 Richard Kettlewell wrote:
But you have backups anyway, right?
OK ,let's ask the awkward questions. 1.How many of the members of this list have *complete* backups the their umpteen-gigabyte disks?
I don't think it is necessary to back up an entire disk, just the important bits. I use three 250me zip discs. One holds docs, my own source code and mail, another mp3 files and the third important progs not normaly found in distributions.
This way, whenever I reinstall I just back these three up first, install/format, set up the same users and copy these three discs across. the only other thing I have to do is set up email/news accounts agin.
Ian
While in theory one does not have to back up the root partition, in practice there are always config files lying around there and it is yea annoying to have to reconstruct them.
It would be nice if there were nothing mutable under /etc /bin /lib /usr/bin /sbin /usr/sbin and /usr/lib. All private software should be in /usr/local or /opt or the like, and all configs under /var. Unfortunately, Linux does not quite let you do it, although you can almost do so. I build diskless systems that share most of their root partitions, but each still has to have its own /etc.
On 15-Sep-2002 Ian thompson-bell wrote:
On Sunday 15 Sep 2002 1:53 pm, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
(There's no need to CC me on postings to the list.)
Raphael Mankin writes:
On 15-Sep-2002 Richard Kettlewell wrote:
But you have backups anyway, right?
OK ,let's ask the awkward questions. 1.How many of the members of this list have *complete* backups the their umpteen-gigabyte disks?
I don't think it is necessary to back up an entire disk, just the important bits. I use three 250me zip discs. One holds docs, my own source code and mail, another mp3 files and the third important progs not normaly found in distributions.
This way, whenever I reinstall I just back these three up first, install/format, set up the same users and copy these three discs across. the only other thing I have to do is set up email/news accounts agin.
Ian
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On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 at 12:50:11PM +0100, Raphael Mankin wrote:
OK ,let's ask the awkward questions. 1.How many of the members of this list have *complete* backups the their umpteen-gigabyte disks? 2. How long would it take you to rebuild your system to ts *current* state after a disk crash?
1. well a complete backup is unecessary as I only backup data, and configs thats it. I have a partition mounted as /space which is where my music (which is backed up on the CDs i ripped it from) and downloads of software from the web most of which i have as .iso images. I don't understand why you would need to backup *everything* as that is not really necessary and would be a waste of time space and resources.
2. It took me about 4 hours to restore my debian desktop after I had that bad experience with gentoo, I had a copy of the packages list and did a base install off the CD, primed dpkg and apt-get (got) everything over the net which is what took the most time. I then also found the nice use for the debian kernel-package system as I had a backup of my kernel on CD so installed that which took 3 seconds as opposed to having to get kernel-source and rebuild it. After that I had about 1 hour of installing things like Nvidia drivers and restoring the backups of vmware etc. So the real work took me about 2 hours in total. so it took me 4 hours to rebuild my system, although I have rebuilt a fileserver which also did DNS and NIS and was crucial in 2 hours but with help from one other person, basically we did the same as I did for my desktop. The main differences/advantages were that we had a local debian mirror on site and the computer shop around the corner was open so we could get a new disk.
Although it could be worse you could be rebuilding a Windows system which I have found takes about well forever. It is never quite the same, and you always get new and interesting problems...
:) Adam
Raphael Mankin wrote:
On 15-Sep-2002 Richard Kettlewell wrote:
Ashley ashley@ashleyhowes.com writes:
If you are using RAID, I don't suggest having it on the motherboard. The reason for this is failure. Unless you have another m/b of the same type, it will be difficult to recover your data.
But you have backups anyway, right?
OK ,let's ask the awkward questions. 1.How many of the members of this list have *complete* backups the their umpteen-gigabyte disks? 2. How long would it take you to rebuild your system to ts *current* state after a disk crash?
I have complete, daily tape backups, but I have never yet managed to rebuild a system in under a week. The new system always has a slightly different configuration from the old one, and there is always something that I overlook when selecting what to restore. Then there are incompatible libraries etc.
We have a backup server, and we use rsync-diff to backup all the orther servers to it. The bu server is then itself backed up to another server in "another place". I think we're as well covered as we can be. Our Gentoo build is automated, requiring only a few questions asked and about 5 config files, so rebuilding a server takes 3 hrs, then the data restore. All data is stored in a separate partition, making restoration easier.
Cheers, Laurie.
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Adam Bower -
Ashley -
Christopher Drane -
Ian thompson-bell -
Laurie Brown -
MJ Ray -
Raphael Mankin -
Richard Kettlewell